Adventures in Onionism

Multiple Hearst papers are reporting on the Boy Scouts selling their land (often donated to them, often strictly deeded for conservation and recreation) to be logged and developed. The first article in the series, about logging. One of today's articles from the Chron, about development (both with links on the left side to many of the stories from the series). Map of reported abuses. BSA response.

Given my research idea (and my film snobbery), this article about the box office success of Paul Blart: Mall Cop is pretty interesting. This poll is the best poll ever. If I were a big nerd, I'd tell you that if you assume there's exactly a 50% chance that international voters choose heads, then the odds of 1857 of the 3439 international voters choosing heads are exactly 3439!/(1857!1582!)*.5^1857*.5^1582. If were an even bigger nerd I'd simplify that expression for you using Matlab, because it seems it would take me more than 30 seconds to figure out how to get google, Excel, or Stata to crunch numbers that large/small for me. Oh well.

I'm thinking that performance doesn't fall off after an award in baseball. Comparing MVP's and Rookies of the Year to their runners up (and multiple runners up) the winners are still better after a few years. In fact, I think I'm seeing that they get more better. So I had a thought. Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong type of award, and perhaps I need to look at getting awarded a new free-agent contract, although I'd be surprised if this hasn't been done before. There's lots of examples of people sucking after landing a big contract (Zito). I think this would help me answer the question "how is this economics?" a lot better. I'm looking at performance after awards in general, and perhaps in "award" means something different in different contexts. As for movies (why are there so many R-rated movies when they're less profitable?), I haven't made much progress here (I got some revenue data, but I'm not to the point whe

Facebook is killing personal blogging, but just for (six months ago) old time's sake, here are some links. In honor of my not liking U2's new single very much, here's a belated link to a review of Chinese Democracy by the person most qualified to write such a review, Chuck Klosterman, my hipster idol. The true story of a lobotomy performed on a 12-year old at the insistence of his (evil?) step-mom. I learned about this from the NPR show To the Best of Our Knowledge , which usually isn't so depressing. My buddy Schnapp turned me on to a great blog about transit and smart land use in the Washington DC area called Greater Greater Washington . I really like this post about the capability of transit as exemplified by inauguration day. I guess transbayblog.com is sort of the equivalent for the bay area, but posts there don't seem to be quite as frequent. Speaking of transit, it is getting the shaft in the proposed stimulus package. TPM says so, and GGW says so,

As is my wont, I went to Truckee for the weekend. First, this might have been a one-time glitch, but using the Amtrak MasterCard to get Amtrak Rewards points resulted in a rate of return much higher than the typical 1% from other cards. Just an FYI. More importantly, I went snowshoeing. Scratching my head in Coldcreek Canyon On the way up towards the ridge between Anderson Peak and Mt. Lincoln Just underneath the ridge The Benson Hut Looking west towards Royal Gorge, the American River, and even the coastal range Sure, this is a windswept ridge, but there really is a large drought. The only tree I saw all day that hadn't phlumfed yet Heading down Mt. Judah towards the train tracks and Donner Lake. Sproul Plaza during the inauguration. The cheers for "data and statistics," "science," "universities," and "non-believers" were amazing. Finally, I nabbed this Getty image from WaPo, just because it's awesome how Blofeldian/Strangeloveian

How many other econ grad students had the thought "reg enlistment recession gibill combat_deaths afqt_requirements, robust" after reading this NYT article? OK, maybe some of the terms should be in logs. Either way, very interesting, and probably of more importance than my other sports/movie ideas. (For non-Stata geeks, this is the code to run a regression, i.e., fit a line through points, but in multiple dimensions, to find the correlation between all those things and enlistment.)

Friends from ALDHA-West alerted me to the existence of a bill currently before the floor of the Senate, S22, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which would designate a bunch of new areas as wilderness, designate several trails as National Historic/Scenic Trails, and generally be totally awesome. According to Congress Matters it passed a cloture vote a few hours ago so should be up for a real vote soon. Read the full text on Thomas . Follow the bill's status on OpenCongress . Use the American Hiking Society's link to tell your Senatorial peeps to vote for it. Do any hiker friends know anything about the New England National Scenic Trail ? I'd never heard of it before just now.

I just finished the documentary film Surfwise , and I must say, it's probably a good thing I don't surf, because it's hard enough to fight the urge to drop out of society when I do one sport that encourages me to do so; two might be impossible. Also, I learned that if you're going to raise your kids like a pack of wolves/gorillas/hippies, some of your kids will resent you if you don't at least educate them. The film is about the Paskowitz family, the father of which, Dorian Paskowitz, is a Stanford educated doctor who for a while led a successful normal life, becoming the president of the Hawaiian chapter of the AMA and almost running for governor. But he hit a rough patch and eventually decided to drop out. (Amusingly, after first dropping out, Dorian moved to Israel, came to believe that his first two marriages had failed because he was a lousy lover, decided to sleep with 100 women and rank them on performance, but stopped when he found Juliette, who he thought

Norm MacDonald was my favorite comedian in high school. Blame him if you don't like my sarcastic sense of humor. In honor of my being lame and not getting tickets to see him perform in SF this past weekend before they sold out, here are two awesome clips.

For the moment I'm telling myself that even if baseball doesn't really matter much to the economy, learning about performance after awards does say something useful about a general aspect of human behavior, so here's a table. If I've done this right (big if) these are the ba, hr, slug, and obp for every MVP and Rookie of the Year winner, runner-up, and first and second runner-up since 1954 (these are the offensive awards that get voted on, and this is when they started recording the sac fly, and thus you can calculate obp). `stat'plusX is the given stat X years after the award, and `stat'changeX is the difference in the stat X years after the award. What do I take away from this? The winners are still better than the runners-up, and you see some convergence, which is basically mean reversion. Don't try and run very far with this preliminary result.

I spent the last few days getting trained to be part of VITA and help low-income people file their income taxes (and, importantly, get them their often-unclaimed EITC), going to the annual economist academic job-market conference (AKA the AEA's) that happened to be in SF this year, and moving back to Berkeley (I moved in with some friend from the department by the Claremont in Berkeley. I'm now about 3 or 4 blocks from the trails, so life is good.) What I learned at the conference: 1. Academic economists have to wear suits and ties on occasion. (Damn it!) 2. The Beard thesis has nothing to do with facial hair. 3. The state of Maine has looked into the idea of creating a drug-seller registry/notification system akin to the sex offender system in place in many states. This is an amusingly bad idea. I recently finished reading Wallace Stegner's Mormon Country , which was the best book about the desert/Utah/the Colorado Plateau I've read. My favorite lines: What Everett

Last Friday I went down near Santa Cruz and celebrated the new year by running the Skyline to the Sea Trail from the beach to the crest and back. Wikipedia says it's 29.5 miles each way; my friends that measured it with their own measuring wheel say it's only a little over 26. It took me 15:58 to do it both ways. I made plans a week ahead of time to get a ride with a friend that was going to visit family in Santa Cruz, and the day we picked unfortunately ended up being the only rainy day all week, but it was still a pretty good run. I've heard some people be very enthusiastic about this trail, and not to be too disparaging, but I think those people just haven't hiked on the JMT. I mean, it's kind of a cool trail, there are some gigantic trees in the miles closest to the ocean, and I had a good time, but a lot of the trail is paralleling highways 236 and 9, and a good portion of it just has gigantic tree stumps as opposed to gigantic trees. If the Lost Coast an

Happy New Year. 2008 was OK as far as school and running went, but it was lame as far as hiking. I enjoyed the last two semesters of grad school more than any of the previous four, but my summer and winter breaks contained no hikes longer than a hundred miles and therefore kind of sucked. I can think of only 13 nights I spent outside in 2008, while 2007 had 178 in a row, plus I was living abroad for the first 58 days of the year. However, I did finally pass my second field exam and thus got my master's degree, and I did run more races than I've ever done before: five 50K's, two 50-milers, and a 24-hour (not to mention stuff on my own: fast-packing the WS course and running to Diablo and back twice). I set four big goals after finishing the CDT; I completed two: running Diablo fast and passing the Law & Econ field exam. I didn't run St. George fast, nor did I even enter the race, because I've decided I don't like running on roads, nor do I have a date s